Symptoms

Finding the Symptoms page

Understanding the Symptom Tracker

In PKB, healthcare teams have the ability to request that patients monitor specific symptoms. This is called a Symptom Tracker. The symptoms selected will appear on the patient home page.

How do I set up the Symptom Tracker?

Select ‘Edit’ and tick the symptom in the ‘Monitor?’ column to include them in the tracker.

The order column can be used to select which order you would like the symptoms to appear in for the patient. This is done by putting the number at which you would like it to appear in the list. The symptom with '1' in the order field will appear first, followed by '2', '3' etc.

Add any weightings and set your Amber and Red threshold values. The final box is for how long a period the monitoring tab should track. For example, if you choose 30 days, that tab shows you the patients in the last 30 days who have gone above the threshold values you set.

What are Weightings?

The 'Weighting' column can be used to prioritise certain symptoms. The higher the number the stronger the weighting. For example, you could choose to put 3 on the most important symptom and 1 on the rest. Each number used for weighting is then multiplied depending on the level of severity recorded. Please see the formula for this below.

What are thresholds?

At the bottom of the Symptoms page, you can enter a numerical value for a 'Red Threshold', and an 'Amber Threshold'. This is the number at which patients will appear in the monitoring alarm list for professionals. The severity of the symptoms tracked, and the weightings attached to them are used to calculate this value. When deciding on weighting and thresholds, please bear in mind that the score is cumulative and not per symptom. For example, if the Co-ordinator weighted one symptom with a 3, other symptoms with 1, and a patient logged the weighted symptom as severe, this would break a threshold of 3. If a patient logs 3 other symptoms as mild - this would also meet the threshold of 3 and trigger an alarm. Therefore, if you are only interested in a particular symptom being severe, you could choose not to weight the other symptoms, or weight the chosen symptom much higher.